by Jane Haddam
Kyle went over to the woman sitting on the box. “Peggy?” he said. “Peggy, what happened here?”
This must be Peggy Smith Kennedy, Gregor realized. He looked her up and down, but it wasn’t a good time to check her out. She was dazed. She was covered with sticky blood.
“Peggy,” Kyle said.
Peggy looked up. “It was sticking out of her,” she said. “I looked down and it was sticking out of her and then I just grabbed it and pulled and I fell, and when I was trying to pick myself up George came, I heard him come in the door. And then I don’t know what happened. Is she dead?”
“No,” Gregor Demarkian said. “And if we get lucky, she won’t be.”
“She isn’t dead?” Peggy looked confused.
One of the ambulance men must have been a paramedic. He had done something to stanch the flow of blood, and now two other ambulance men were lifting Emma Bligh carefully onto a stretcher. Peggy looked at them in astonishment.
“How could she be alive after all that blood? How is it possible?”
“Mr. Demarkian here says she had armor made of fat,” Kyle said. “Listen, Peggy, I think you should go to the hospital, too. You’re in shock. You need to be taken care of.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“I don’t care if you want to go,” Kyle said. “You should go. You need to be looked at. You need to find out if—”
“If Stu finds out I was here, he’ll kill me,” Peggy said. “He really will. I stayed home from school today because I was feeling, well, you know, not well, and he hates that. He really hates that. He has to stay out sick so much himself. He’s always sick. He goes crazy when he thinks I am. He thinks I’m at school. He thinks—”
“Shh,” Kyle said.
“It isn’t just blood from Emma Bligh,” Gregor said. He got a handkerchief out of his pocket, reached forward, and took the linoleum cutter out of Peggy Smith Kennedy’s hands. The parts of the blade that were not streaked with blood gleamed. “She’s got a black eye. She’s got bruises on her arm. I think her left pinkie finger is broken.”
“Jesus,” Kyle said.
Peggy Smith Kennedy stared at the linoleum cutter. “That was inside her. It was sticking out of her. And I thought, you can’t leave it like that. You can’t leave Emma on the floor with a thing like that in her. So I took it out, and then there was blood everywhere. There was blood all over me. I’m never going to get it out of this dress.”
The ambulance men took the stretcher with Emma Bligh on it out of the room. A few moments later, George Bligh stuck his head through the curtains.
“Is it true? Is she really still alive?”
“She was when I listened to her heartbeat,” Gregor told him. “In spite of how awful it looks, my guess is that the wound isn’t anywhere near as serious as it would have to be to kill her. She—”
“I’m going to follow the ambulance to the hospital,” George said. “If you want to arrest me, you can do it later. I’m going to the hospital now.”
He ducked back out of the curtains, and Kyle shook his head. “It’s not like he’s going anyplace we can’t find him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“There was blood everywhere even before I took it out of her,” Peggy Smith Kennedy said. “I stepped in it.”
All of a sudden, there were sirens, lots of sirens. Some of them would be the ambulance taking Emma Kenyon Bligh to the hospital. Some of them turned out to be the state police. Gregor heard them as they came up the porch steps, barking orders. Gregor went out into the little room and then beyond it into the bigger one. He watched as one of the state police officers tried to push people back onto the porch. The other officer came up to him.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said.
“How do you do.” If he’d met the officer by name, Gregor didn’t remember him. “You’d better go on back, through the next room and then through a curtain. There’s another one.”
“Another body?”
“Another woman. The woman the ambulance just took is alive. That’s why she’s gone. Go on back. There’s something I’ve got to do. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“Is the other woman dead?” the officer asked.
She might as well be, Gregor thought, but he didn’t say it. He watched the officer at the door finally get all the unauthorized people out onto the porch and then lock the door behind him. Then he sat down behind Emma Bligh’s counter and picked up the phone.
2
Bennis Hannaford was not only in but showered and dressed, and just two floors down from Jimmy Card and Elizabeth Toliver.
“Nobody knows we’re here yet, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said, when she’d heard Gregor out. “Although I don’t expect that’s going to last long. If I recognized the car, somebody else will. I mean Jimmy Card’s car. Didn’t you say you had Elizabeth Toliver’s car? Where is it?”
“At Andy’s garage,” Gregor said. “Do you think you could go up there and ask them if they’ve seen anything at all of Maris Coleman?”
“Who’s Maris Coleman?”
“Somebody who works for Ms. Toliver. It’s a long story. Do you think you could—”
“What, Gregor? Just march upstairs, muscle my way onto their floor and walk up to Elizabeth Toliver and say ‘Hello, Ms. Toliver. It’s nice to meet you. I’ve always enjoyed your work. Where is Maris Coleman?’”
“Bennis, for God’s sake. I don’t have the phone number. I wasn’t even sure where they were until you told me. I was just calling you up to see if you could find out. Since you’re there, go ask them if they’ve seen Maris Coleman at any time this morning. All right? There’s a woman half dead out here and—”
“Another one? Where? At Elizabeth Toliver’s house?”
“No. Nowhere near there. In town. It’s a long story. Now will you please—”
“It’ll take forever. Five minutes. Ten.”
“I’ll wait.”
“But—”
“I’ll wait,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to know if they’ve seen anything of Maris Coleman this morning, all right? Go. It’s only going to take longer if you stand there arguing.”
“Hell,” Bennis said.
Gregor heard a clunk that he supposed must be the phone receiver hitting some kind of surface—the night table, the floor—and sat back to watch the state police help Peggy Smith Kennedy out of the back room and through the front rooms toward the door. There were still dozens of people on the porch outside, but there was also a state police officer.
Peggy Smith Kennedy was hobbling when she walked. The chalk whiteness of her face made the growing bruises around her eyes all the more noticeable. If she’d been trying to hide what was going on in her marriage, she was about to lose the fight—but Gregor knew she’d already lost it. She went out onto the porch holding on to a state police officer the way swooning maidens held on to rescuing lovers in bad nineteenth-century novels.
Kyle Borden came up and said, “Who’re you calling? We’ve got to get back to the station.”
“Give me a minute,” Gregor told him. There were suddenly voices on the other end of the phone, and Gregor distinctly heard Bennis say “halvah.” He shook his head. “Bennis?” he said into the phone.
“Mr. Demarkian?” It was not Bennis’s voice. “This is Liz Toliver. I’m sorry. From what Bennis said, it seemed to make more sense if I talked to you directly, but—oh, thank you, this is wonderful—but we didn’t know where you were to call you back from upstairs. Bennis says someone was attacked but not killed. Was that Maris? Is Maris hurt?”
“What’s she feeding you?” Gregor asked.
“What? Oh, halvah, you know, the stuff that’s like a brick with a tahine base. You can get it in New York in some places. This is better. Is Maris hurt?”
“I have no idea,” Gregor said. “I don’t know where she is. I was hoping you did.”
“Oh, no. I don’t. We haven’t seen her all morning. We were worried about it earlier.
We thought she might still be back at the house.”
“Still? You mean, she was there this morning?”
“We don’t know,” Liz Toliver said. “I remember last night. She passed out on the couch. And that was the last time I saw her. But she didn’t have her car, so if she was passed out on the couch last night she should still be in the house, because she wouldn’t have any way to get home. Back to Belinda’s, I mean.”
“I didn’t see her,” Gregor said. “Not at the house this morning.”
“She isn’t usually at the house in the morning,” Liz said, “so you don’t expect to see her. But we’re very worried that she wandered off and fell asleep somewhere and didn’t hear all the commotion this morning and got left behind, and maybe she’s still out there. She couldn’t call anybody. Not with the phone lines cut. She could be stranded.”
Gregor almost said that if Maris Coleman were stranded in that house, it was because she had stranded herself there. There was no way that anybody who wasn’t in a coma could have slept through that hysteria this morning.
“We’ll go out there and check,” he said, waving away Kyle’s protest. “What I wanted to know was if you’d seen her, and now I know. I take it you’ve been with Jimmy and the boys ever since you left your house this morning?”
“Well, I took a shower by myself, but it was only for about twenty minutes.”
“That’s fine,” Gregor told her. “That’s much too short a time to have done what you’d needed to do. What about in the last hour? Have you been mostly visible?”
“Oh, yes. Jimmy and I have been—discussing things.”
Gregor heard Bennis whoop with laughter in the background. He ignored her. “Good,” he said. “That puts you out of it, at least for this attack. That’s helpful.”
“Who was it? Who got attacked? You said she isn’t dead?”
“Not dead, no, but badly hurt,” Gregor said. “It’s a woman named Emma Kenyon Bligh.”
There was a silence on the other end of the phone. “Emma Kenyon. My God.”
“I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen enough people who’d been attacked to say with some certainty that she’s likely to be all right in the long run. I don’t know how long a run.”
“Maris said she’d gained a lot of weight,” Liz Toliver said.
“I’d estimate that she weighs close to four hundred and fifty pounds,” Gregor said. “She’s very large. It probably saved her life.”
“Well,” Liz Toliver said.
“Would you mind if I talked to Bennis again?” Gregor said.
There was more talking in the background, and more passing around of food. Bennis was promising to pack up a box of pastries for the boys, and Liz Toliver was insisting that she come upstairs and have coffee with Jimmy and the rest of them. So much for Bennis’s worries about how Liz would take to being around one of Jimmy’s former lovers. Gregor thought it was interesting that Bennis never seemed to have worried for a moment about how he would feel about being around one of her former lovers. She picked up the phone.
“Gregor? Are you coming on out? Because if you are, I’m going upstairs for some coffee and you might as well meet me up there.”
“I probably won’t be home for hours,” Gregor said. “Have you called Russ for me?”
“Yes. Already did it. You asked Tibor to check, too. Russ said to tell you that he’ll check, but he isn’t very hopeful. He said it would be easier for him if you knew exactly what you were looking for. Do you?”
“Yes. But if I tell him, he’ll go looking for that in particular, and I might miss something I’m not expecting. There’s always a chance that there’s something I’m not expecting. Although I don’t believe there will be, in this case. Go up and have coffee with Liz Toliver. Say hello to Mark for me.”
“All right. Where are you? How do we get in touch with you?”
“I’m at a store on Grandview Avenue called Country Crafts, but I won’t be here for long. Your best bet is to call the police department, but I’d feel much better if you don’t have to. There’s more going on here than I can tell you about yet. Take care of yourself.”
“You take care of yourself. You sound funny.”
“I feel fine. I’ll talk to you later, Bennis.”
Gregor put the phone down in the cradle and looked up to see that Kyle Borden was hovering over him, glowering.
“We can’t go back out to the Toliver house now,” he said. “We’ve got to go back to the station. We’ve got reports to file. We’ve got the Staties to worry about. We’ve—”
“I’ll go back by myself if you want me to. Maris Coleman seems to be missing.”
“Missing from where?”
Gregor gave Kyle a rundown of the events of the night before and this morning, and Kyle kicked the side of the counter.
“Shit damn,” he said. “She must still be out there, right? She’s probably wandering around in that house drinking coffee spiked with whatever she spikes it with and pretending nobody ever notices. Shit damn. We’ll have to go get her. Or send somebody else to.”
“Oh, I don’t think she’s still out there. There were a hundred people who could have given her a ride, if she was willing to pay for it by talking a blue streak, and I think she’d have been willing to do that. Don’t you?”
“She’d have paid them to let her. If we’re not rescuing Maris, what are we doing? Why are we going out there?”
“I want to make sure something isn’t there.”
“What?”
“Just something,” Gregor said. “Listen, what about here? What’s left to do? Did the state police bring in some decent forensics this time? What about the linoleum cutter?”
“One of the Staties picked it up with a handkerchief and put it in a plastic bag. It’s probably got my fingerprints on it. I took it away from Peggy and it didn’t occur to me to use a handkerchief. It’s been coming home to me, lately, just how well I was trained for this job. Meaning not at all. You have no idea how much I feel like a jerk.”
“It’s a waste of time,” Gregor told him. “Right now, the real issue is that that linoleum cutter is almost certainly going to turn out to be the murder weapon in the death of Chris Inglerod Barr. It would be a good thing if we didn’t lose it. Go back and tell the state policemen that. Whatever. Then let’s pack up and go on out to Liz Toliver’s house. With any luck, there won’t be much of anybody left there to bother us.”
“Right,” Kyle said. He gave Gregor a long, puzzled, and faintly resentful look and then went on back to the curtained space, where more state police officers were crowded than it seemed that the building could hold.
Gregor sat down in the heavy chair Emma Bligh kept behind the counter and took his notepad out of his inside jacket pocket. He flipped to the front and found the list that Jimmy Card had given him when he first agreed to look into the death of Michael Houseman. The list was not complete. Jimmy had been working off the things Liz Toliver had told him, not as part of a coherent story but as pieces in an ongoing conversation. The list did not include Stuart Kennedy’s name, or Kyle Borden’s. Gregor checked off the names of Chris Inglerod and Emma Kenyon, and then wrote Stuart Kennedy’s and Kyle Borden’s at the bottom of the list.
Kyle came up from the back of the store. “That’s done,” he said. “They think it’s going to turn out to be the murder weapon, too. Where would you get something like that?”
“In a hardware store,” Gregor said. “At Home Depot. A lot of people who do odd jobs around the house have them.”
“I think I’d cut half my hand off just trying to pick one up.”
Gregor stood up and shook the wrinkles out of his jacket. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go see what’s still out at the house and then let’s try to do something sensible with what we find.”
3
It was odd, Gregor thought, that Elizabeth Toliver’s house should look so much like he had seen it for the first time, and not at all as he had been seeing it si
nce—experiencing it since, Bennis would say, to indicate that he was really talking about a kind of emotional atmosphere. This afternoon, there was no atmosphere around the place at all. There was only rain, which was now slightly, but only slightly, less furious than it had been an hour or two before. Gregor looked up and down the road as they drove into the Toliver driveway, but it was as completely deserted as anything he had ever seen, which was a relief.
Kyle pulled the car into the driveway halfway to the garage and cut the engine. “Here we are,” he said. “What exactly is it that you want to do?”
“I want to look for something,” Gregor said. “Let’s start with the garage first. And let me ask you something. Does Elizabeth Toliver make you angry?”
“Betsy? No, of course she doesn’t make me angry. Why should she?”
Gregor got out of the car and headed for the garage. Kyle was behind him in a moment. “She makes a lot of people angry,” Gregor said, pulling up the first garage door he came to, “have you noticed that? I don’t mean just envious or jealous or even resentful, but really down dirty furious. Belinda Hart could barely say Liz’s name without spitting it. And then there’s Maris Coleman. You haven’t been watching Ms. Coleman’s behavior from up close these last few days. I have. ‘Angry’ is almost too mild a word for it. The emotion runs so deep, I don’t think Maris Coleman even wishes Liz Toliver dead. I think death would be too quick. The pain would be over. Maris Coleman wishes Liz Toliver a long life lived in unending pain and humiliation.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little strong?” Kyle said.
“No.” Gregor looked around the garage. It was dark at the best of times. Now, with so little light coming from outside, it was virtually pitch. “Are there any lights in this place?” he asked.
“Right here.” Kyle fumbled around for a moment, and then three weak bulbs, screwed into ceiling fixtures without benefit of shades, glowed on. Kyle blinked. “I guess I can’t imagine Maris Coleman working up all that much energy about anything,” he said.